Featured in Architecture & Design

Monal Daxini presents a blueprint for streaming data architectures and a review of desirable features of a streaming engine. He also talks about streaming application patterns and anti-patterns, and use cases and concrete examples using Apache Flink.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Joy Gao talks about how database streaming is essential to WePay's infrastructure and the many functions that database streaming serves. She provides information on how the database streaming infrastructure was created & managed so that others can leverage their work to develop their own database streaming solutions. She goes over challenges faced with streaming peer-to-peer distributed databases.

News

The 2019 State of Testing survey is now seeking participation, and aims to provide insights into how the testing profession develops and to recognize testing trends. Anyone completing the survey will receive a complimentary copy of the State of Testing 2019 report once it is published.

Adding agility to Lean Product Development enabled Toyota Connected to deliver faster, with higher quality, and reduced costs. Nigel Thurlow presented “Lean is NOT enough” at Lean Digital Summit 2018 where he showed how they embraced agile for colocated teams and outsourcing, and how portfolio planning evolved to an executive prioritization model to increase business agility.

After adopting Scrum, Banco BPI came to lean in an iterative way, by doing things that made sense to them in their context. Their goal is to bring parties closer together to optimise the whole system and avoid micro-optimisations. Your own context and needs must guide you, don't wait to have the perfect answer, but iterate relentlessly and take small steps is what they learned.

The Norwegian Labor and Welfare Directorate wanted to transform their IT department to be able to deliver value continuously and deliver faster, in line with users' ever-increasing expectations. Torill Iversen, director, and Kjell Tore Guttormsen, team lead, spoke about how they went from bureaucracy to enterprise agility at the Atlassian Summit Europe 2018.

Fabrice Bernhard, co-founder and CEO of Theodo UK, presented "what lean can learn from digital natives" at Lean Digital Summit 2018. Digital natives are familiar with the lean startup and agile practices. They go further by combining Agile with the Toyota Production System which enables them to experiment with ideas, spread innovations, and scale fast.

Lean tools can help to improve productivity and fulfil customer commitments. At Keepeek, techniques like pull flow, PDCA, and Red Bin are used to analyse discrepancies. Improvements are prioritised on customer impact. As a result, their throughput increased significantly, customer satisfaction went up, and their NPS improved.

In a purpose-centric agile implementation, stakeholders make a clear shared purpose come to reality through visible outcomes. It starts with awareness of the organisation’s installed culture, finding installed habits and beliefs that pull back and block change, and deciding what you want to do about that. The second step is to create the necessary time and space for true change to happen.

Citizens can get the information and services they need more quickly because users' needs are considered in government service design, and suppliers can work with the government in modern agile ways: these are two benefits resulting from the UK Government's digital transformation. Having teams exposed directly to users motivates teams to make their products better.

Arnold Egg will talk at the upcoming Agile Impact conference in Indonesia on Agile in a Dynamic Environment, exploring his experience as CTO of one of the largest conglomerates in Asia. He talks about how Indonesia is ideally situated to provide products and services for other parts of the world and what Digital Transformation is about. There is no single solution and copy-past adoptions fail.

Arthur Purnama will talk at the upcoming Agile Impact conference in Indonesia about his experiences helping organisations move towards integrated IT, and how the importance of understanding how people think, comprehend, and receive the message of change is crucial to the success of any transformation program.

Fin Goulding, international CIO at Aviva, recently spoke at the DevOps Enterprise Summit London about using flow principles to advance agile capabilities throughout an organisation. InfoQ asked Goulding to expand on some of the points that he made during his talk.

It is essential that everyone involved in operating the business be aware of how IT can change daily operations. Senior management can look across silos and teams to impact the throughput of the entire system. IT managers and executives rely on business managers being active participants for teams to work effectively and efficiently. Management commitment remains key for agile across the company.

The 2018 State of Agile Report has been published by CollabNet VersionOne. Some of the conclusions from the report are that the need for customer and user satisfaction is increasing, more and more organizations are scaling agile, distributed teams are becoming the norm in agile software development, and many organization have started or plan to start a DevOps initiative in the next 12 months.

One of the last barriers to organisations becoming agile in their operations is the procurement process. At the recent Agilia Conference, Mirko Kleiner presented on Lean-Agile Procurement, an approach to negotiating service contracts which involves procurement specialists, IT teams and suppliers, to move from a combative stance to a collaborative approach to addressing the customers’ needs.